From butcheries and small factories to slaughterhouses: workers’ experience with slaughter and boning in West Parana

Abstract

This paper aims at historically discussing the experience of workers employed in butcheries and small factories in Cascavel-PR and in West Paraná during the last 50 years. Based in oral interviews with the workers employed in meat processing, and in reports published in local press, the paper intends to analyze the conflict and tensions between different forms of meat production along the establishment of the poultry industry in the region, during 1960-2015. It is argued that the reorganization of meat processing in West Paraná was a project articulated by the ruling classes in order to enable capital accumulation, but that this process occured maked by the presence of other forms of meat production. Thus, until the 1980s the workers’ knowledge and practice of butcheries and small factories needed to be recruited by local slaughterhouses, but as of 1990s, with the expansion of poultry industry, these other forms of meat production began to be stigmatized. It is possible to observe, in this context, changes in the perception of hygiene and of frozen meat consumption, as well as the disqualification of the knowledge and practice accumulated through the workers’ experience in those butcheries and small factories.